Scott Brown did not come from a privileged background. The Weekly Standardwrites:

Brown grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Wakefield, Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and his mother and father each remarried three times. “My mom was on welfare,” Brown told me in an earlier interview. His memory of “getting the blocks of cheese from the back of the truck” while he was a child on welfare is one reason he’s “fiscally responsible” today.

“I don’t think I would have changed a thing,” Brown says of his tough childhood. “Because if I changed one thing it affects everything else. If I wasn’t on welfare or wasn’t from a broken home, I never would have learned from my parents’ mistakes” and been so devoted to his wife of 23 years, TV news anchor Gail Huff, and two college-aged daughters, Ayla and Arianna….

Brown got his start in politics when he was elected assessor and then selectman in Wrentham in the early 1990s. Beginning in 1998, he won three terms in the state house and then three terms in the state senate, where only 4 of his 39 colleagues were Republicans.

That Brown is a perfect fit for Massachusetts doesn’t mean that he’s bound to disappoint conservatives. True, Massachusetts is one of the bluest states in the country. But during his campaign, Brown sided with conservatives on almost all the major policy issues before the Senate and still managed to appeal to independents.